(no subject)
Things:
This weekend, I went home. I went to the dentist, learned how to do my taxes, saw Shut Up And Dance, visited Desh, and bumped into a random girl who was going from Philadelphia to the exact same train station I was headed to in New Jersey. My mother considers herself a good taxes teacher. She said, this is the soft ware. Enter your W-2. This is what INTs, OIDs, DIVs, etc look like. Fill them in. Tomorrow, we'll look up how your sister did this, and I'll show you where to enter in your receipts for your teaching materials. So, I did what she said, and then I took care of the sister and teacher things before "tomorrow" came. Mind you, my mother knows when to walk away...which is a good skill in a teacher. (By walk, I mean roll.) But, mostly, the software is a good teacher. It sits there with its click-me descriptions, and I click and say, "oh, okay. i get it. i can pay less taxes because i'm a nut and spend lots of money on medical stuffs. ooh, hey, a discount for renting in nj. nice." Yay for people like desh who make software for people to use. Desh, where is my memo, by the way? You won't be safe from biting until I receive it in triplicate.
I'm supposed to tell conana what I think of gender. I had a dream that I was choosing between taking a course in gender and race politics and something else. I remember choosing the other and then regretting it a minute later. I didn't remember that dream until just now, but I know I'm not taking any courses at the moment, so it has to be a dream.
I was talking to a friend who never comments on my LJ anymore *coughs* and I was shocked to hear that he still reads it. He was similarly shocked to hear that I read his. I remember once commenting a lot in other people's journals frequently and being rewarded in kind. That was a good feeling, but it takes a lot of effort. In class, we have a journal assignment...a sentence or more...just noting the date and anything that's going on or on your mind. There's fifteen kids. That means that when students were getting into the swing of writing in their journals, I'd respond to between 5 and 10 students' journals per day. That's 25-50 comments in a week. But, no one pays me to respond to your journals, and you're just not as cool as my students. Nor am I your eyes and ears.
This weekend was strange. Okay, first off, mom's worse. What's new? There's always these weird lines in my family. I have to leave the room when mom's going to the bathroom or changing. But she shows up to breakfast on her wheeled toilet. Thank god I'd already eaten. And she made me empty her urine bag...she has a tube coming out of her stomach that goes into a bag. There are 30 empty bottles in the corner of the bathroom waiting to be filled. That's the latest on that. I noticed that she only had one sock on at some point, so I asked about it. She said she'd gotten an infection in that foot. I noticed that the toes looked pretty messed up. (But later I noticed that the same was true of her other foot's toes.) I asked if it was her big toe. She said, no, it was her whole foot. It was swollen and pink and puffy and hot. Her /foot/. You know how they noticed? It was itchy. It's lucky she has some feeling in her feet. I've never met someone who wants to live so badly. I asked her if she got cancer if she'd go through with the treatment....I was trying to figure out if she's just sticking around because it hasn't managed to kill her yet. she said she'd go through the chemo...but she said it was because cancer was painful. she thinks natural deaths are generally painful. she said there were drugs that would put you to sleep quietly. dad commented that the trick was that you had to do it yourself because doctors aren't allowed to help you and other people helping you is homicide. i wasn't on my game with the gallows humour or i would have said that mom couldn't kill herself because she's a doctor. however, i just commented that it was illegal to kill yourself. my proof was that if you try and fail, they lock you up. they usually lock people up as treatment instead of sending them to jail if they did something really wrong but can't be held accountable or had something wrong with them. so, if there weren't something wrong with you, they'd send you to jail for trying to kill yourself.
Dad was returning a movie when he picked me up from the train station. When I asked what it was about, he told me there was a funny story about it. He'd wanted to see, "live free or die hard" and they'd mixed in a movie with the title "live free and die hard" or something like that. He thought it was a typo and forgot to ask about it. It turns out that one of them is a porno, so he'd exchanged it and gotten to watch the one he wanted. So, when I asked him about the movie he'd rented, that was the story he told me--not the plot. He also said that if it'd been heterosexual or lesbian porn he'd have watched it. Somehow, with my upbringing, I didn't even realize that my dad had just told me his porn preferences and that there's something a little disturbing about that. I just joined right in and said that I actually prefered gay male porn. He asked why, rather confused. I explained that straight porn and lesbian porn were usually made for guys, so the female(s) in them are usually being objectified. The same is true of gay male porn, but everyone's a guy, so they have the potential to be really romantic instead of objectifying. He said, I almost follow that. [shrug] And I looked at myself funny because I'd just tried to explain my porn preferences to my father, and I haven't even watched a full porn movie. All I've seen are pictures and clips and stories. But I've listened to enough stories that objectified women and their sexuality enough that power dynamics, particular positions, semen in particular places all have stigmas for me. They say, "you're not worth much to them. why are you participating? why are you letting them do that? you're not worth much to yourself. you're not worth much."
I ended up in dad's lap twice over the course of the weekend. He managed to slip in his usual comment about how he lives for sex. He did not ask for a massage. He only lost it once to his credit, but we were in the car and I was causelessly terrified the entire hour we were in the car. That was on the way to Shut Up And Dance. He sat next to me at the show, and mom sat in the front (wheel chairs are special sometimes)...I got the impression she'd been in touch with the house manager because he shook her hand and said it was a pleasure to finally meet her in person. She has a rather large personality and generally gets what she wants. I figure she was on the phone a lot with him. He knew her name.
[thinks] While we were waiting for the show to start, dad and I talked about excel. How to name cells so as to better document equations. How to make arrays in excel. Etc. It was a continuation of some work he'd shown me before we left. That was when I was in his lap. I don't know why I was in his lap. It happens. I do that. I think I did that this morning with someone else. Wow. I can see all these laps I've sat in. And which was I was facing in situation in relation to the rest of the room and the door. Heh. I'm greatful to all the people who have put up with me in this world. After talking about excel for a while, I commented to dad that most likely I will never use this information. He agreed. There's all these things that I know that I don't use anymore. He said that it had been hard for him to come to terms with the fact that I wouldn't be using these things anymore. I said there were even more things that I wouldn't be using. I know the name of the curtains being used at that performance. I know how to program a light board, or I did. I know how to throw pots. I have a degree in math. I used to be good enough at American Sign Language that it sometimes took deaf people 5 minutes to realize that I wasn't deaf. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a boat, looking back at the wake of unused skills I'm leaving behind me. I wonder if I can ever go back or if I'll just be leaving more things behind me in order to do so. I commented about this to the random girl I met on the train today, and she said that the average person changes careers 7 times in their lifetime. She counted that she'd changed 3 times already. I told her she had 4 more to go before she could be average. I said that it felt like everyone I knew (like in my family) only had one profession ever. That must mean that there are a lot of people who have changed careers well over 7 times to make up for it. I mean, no wonder people call it a midlife crisis if we're all trying to stick to the same job as hard as we can...of course it'll have to grow and grow until it becomes a crisis before people finally break down and do something else. what if it were standard that people worked at a job for 5 years, max and then switched? People might need to be trained more frequently, and you wouldn't have upper management that had been there forever rotting...but people would be less burnt out and if anyone stayed around it'd be because they really loved what they were doing. It probably wouldn't work out, but hey...it's worth considering breaking the current ideal and trend if no one's actually doing it happily, or if it makes many people unhappy.
Sorry this is so long.
This weekend, I went home. I went to the dentist, learned how to do my taxes, saw Shut Up And Dance, visited Desh, and bumped into a random girl who was going from Philadelphia to the exact same train station I was headed to in New Jersey. My mother considers herself a good taxes teacher. She said, this is the soft ware. Enter your W-2. This is what INTs, OIDs, DIVs, etc look like. Fill them in. Tomorrow, we'll look up how your sister did this, and I'll show you where to enter in your receipts for your teaching materials. So, I did what she said, and then I took care of the sister and teacher things before "tomorrow" came. Mind you, my mother knows when to walk away...which is a good skill in a teacher. (By walk, I mean roll.) But, mostly, the software is a good teacher. It sits there with its click-me descriptions, and I click and say, "oh, okay. i get it. i can pay less taxes because i'm a nut and spend lots of money on medical stuffs. ooh, hey, a discount for renting in nj. nice." Yay for people like desh who make software for people to use. Desh, where is my memo, by the way? You won't be safe from biting until I receive it in triplicate.
I'm supposed to tell conana what I think of gender. I had a dream that I was choosing between taking a course in gender and race politics and something else. I remember choosing the other and then regretting it a minute later. I didn't remember that dream until just now, but I know I'm not taking any courses at the moment, so it has to be a dream.
I was talking to a friend who never comments on my LJ anymore *coughs* and I was shocked to hear that he still reads it. He was similarly shocked to hear that I read his. I remember once commenting a lot in other people's journals frequently and being rewarded in kind. That was a good feeling, but it takes a lot of effort. In class, we have a journal assignment...a sentence or more...just noting the date and anything that's going on or on your mind. There's fifteen kids. That means that when students were getting into the swing of writing in their journals, I'd respond to between 5 and 10 students' journals per day. That's 25-50 comments in a week. But, no one pays me to respond to your journals, and you're just not as cool as my students. Nor am I your eyes and ears.
This weekend was strange. Okay, first off, mom's worse. What's new? There's always these weird lines in my family. I have to leave the room when mom's going to the bathroom or changing. But she shows up to breakfast on her wheeled toilet. Thank god I'd already eaten. And she made me empty her urine bag...she has a tube coming out of her stomach that goes into a bag. There are 30 empty bottles in the corner of the bathroom waiting to be filled. That's the latest on that. I noticed that she only had one sock on at some point, so I asked about it. She said she'd gotten an infection in that foot. I noticed that the toes looked pretty messed up. (But later I noticed that the same was true of her other foot's toes.) I asked if it was her big toe. She said, no, it was her whole foot. It was swollen and pink and puffy and hot. Her /foot/. You know how they noticed? It was itchy. It's lucky she has some feeling in her feet. I've never met someone who wants to live so badly. I asked her if she got cancer if she'd go through with the treatment....I was trying to figure out if she's just sticking around because it hasn't managed to kill her yet. she said she'd go through the chemo...but she said it was because cancer was painful. she thinks natural deaths are generally painful. she said there were drugs that would put you to sleep quietly. dad commented that the trick was that you had to do it yourself because doctors aren't allowed to help you and other people helping you is homicide. i wasn't on my game with the gallows humour or i would have said that mom couldn't kill herself because she's a doctor. however, i just commented that it was illegal to kill yourself. my proof was that if you try and fail, they lock you up. they usually lock people up as treatment instead of sending them to jail if they did something really wrong but can't be held accountable or had something wrong with them. so, if there weren't something wrong with you, they'd send you to jail for trying to kill yourself.
Dad was returning a movie when he picked me up from the train station. When I asked what it was about, he told me there was a funny story about it. He'd wanted to see, "live free or die hard" and they'd mixed in a movie with the title "live free and die hard" or something like that. He thought it was a typo and forgot to ask about it. It turns out that one of them is a porno, so he'd exchanged it and gotten to watch the one he wanted. So, when I asked him about the movie he'd rented, that was the story he told me--not the plot. He also said that if it'd been heterosexual or lesbian porn he'd have watched it. Somehow, with my upbringing, I didn't even realize that my dad had just told me his porn preferences and that there's something a little disturbing about that. I just joined right in and said that I actually prefered gay male porn. He asked why, rather confused. I explained that straight porn and lesbian porn were usually made for guys, so the female(s) in them are usually being objectified. The same is true of gay male porn, but everyone's a guy, so they have the potential to be really romantic instead of objectifying. He said, I almost follow that. [shrug] And I looked at myself funny because I'd just tried to explain my porn preferences to my father, and I haven't even watched a full porn movie. All I've seen are pictures and clips and stories. But I've listened to enough stories that objectified women and their sexuality enough that power dynamics, particular positions, semen in particular places all have stigmas for me. They say, "you're not worth much to them. why are you participating? why are you letting them do that? you're not worth much to yourself. you're not worth much."
I ended up in dad's lap twice over the course of the weekend. He managed to slip in his usual comment about how he lives for sex. He did not ask for a massage. He only lost it once to his credit, but we were in the car and I was causelessly terrified the entire hour we were in the car. That was on the way to Shut Up And Dance. He sat next to me at the show, and mom sat in the front (wheel chairs are special sometimes)...I got the impression she'd been in touch with the house manager because he shook her hand and said it was a pleasure to finally meet her in person. She has a rather large personality and generally gets what she wants. I figure she was on the phone a lot with him. He knew her name.
[thinks] While we were waiting for the show to start, dad and I talked about excel. How to name cells so as to better document equations. How to make arrays in excel. Etc. It was a continuation of some work he'd shown me before we left. That was when I was in his lap. I don't know why I was in his lap. It happens. I do that. I think I did that this morning with someone else. Wow. I can see all these laps I've sat in. And which was I was facing in situation in relation to the rest of the room and the door. Heh. I'm greatful to all the people who have put up with me in this world. After talking about excel for a while, I commented to dad that most likely I will never use this information. He agreed. There's all these things that I know that I don't use anymore. He said that it had been hard for him to come to terms with the fact that I wouldn't be using these things anymore. I said there were even more things that I wouldn't be using. I know the name of the curtains being used at that performance. I know how to program a light board, or I did. I know how to throw pots. I have a degree in math. I used to be good enough at American Sign Language that it sometimes took deaf people 5 minutes to realize that I wasn't deaf. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a boat, looking back at the wake of unused skills I'm leaving behind me. I wonder if I can ever go back or if I'll just be leaving more things behind me in order to do so. I commented about this to the random girl I met on the train today, and she said that the average person changes careers 7 times in their lifetime. She counted that she'd changed 3 times already. I told her she had 4 more to go before she could be average. I said that it felt like everyone I knew (like in my family) only had one profession ever. That must mean that there are a lot of people who have changed careers well over 7 times to make up for it. I mean, no wonder people call it a midlife crisis if we're all trying to stick to the same job as hard as we can...of course it'll have to grow and grow until it becomes a crisis before people finally break down and do something else. what if it were standard that people worked at a job for 5 years, max and then switched? People might need to be trained more frequently, and you wouldn't have upper management that had been there forever rotting...but people would be less burnt out and if anyone stayed around it'd be because they really loved what they were doing. It probably wouldn't work out, but hey...it's worth considering breaking the current ideal and trend if no one's actually doing it happily, or if it makes many people unhappy.
Sorry this is so long.